After the exits of Twitter’s chief information security officer, chief privacy officer and chief compliance officer, the Federal Trade Commission issued a warning to Twitter. “We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern,” said Douglas Farrar, the FTC’s director of public affairs, in statement. “No CEO or company is above the law, and companies must follow our consent decrees. Our revised consent order gives us new tools to ensure compliance, and we are prepared to use them.”

Meanwhile, Twitter introduced its “Official” gray verification badge for high-profile accounts on Wednesday, a free alternative to the company’s $8/month blue checkmark. Hours later, the badges were pulled. CEO Elon Musk explained to advertisers in a Twitter Spaces event, “The problem with the Official check mark is that, other than being an aesthetic nightmare, is that it was just another way of creating a two-class system, therefore not addressing the core problem.” On Thursday, the Official badges started reappearing.

Google is expanding its user choice billing pilot, enabling pilot participants to offer an additional billing system alongside Google Play’s for their users in select countries. “Our goal is to understand complexities involved in supporting user choice billing for developers and users in countries across the world while maintaining a safe and positive user experience,” said Google. “This pilot allows us to test and iterate on different implementations, and gather insights from developers and users on their experience to determine how this pilot might evolve.”

Looking to create a more curated experience, Reddit is rolling out a “community muting” feature, will which remove a community’s posts from a user’s notifications and Home/Popular feeds. User will still be able to view, post, and comment in communities they’ve muted, and can unmute a community at any time.

Meta laid off about 13 percent of its work force, or 11,000 employees, as it faces a decline in digital advertising and competition from the likes of TikTok. The layoffs hit across departments and regions. “I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” wrote CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to employees. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.” Employees affected will receive severance of 16 weeks of their base pay, plus two weeks for every year worked at the company.

Verizon introduced a new Fios TV device that consolidates content from streaming services, video on-demand and live. All of a user’s streaming apps are displayed on the bottom row of the home menu of Stream TV, and the top row indicates the available content a user can stream with their current plan. The menu is customizable, enabling users to rearrange the row order and listed apps.

The Albanese Government, the federal executive government of Australia, approved the use of the Spherex Classification Tool as a new mechanism of safeguarding and regulating content in Australia under the Classification Act 1995.

2022 Model D + It List Awards

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ADVERTISING

IAB Tech Lab is launching a new initiative to set technical standards to bring universal addressability to all TV environments. “The TV advertising delivery, distribution, and measurement landscape is fragmented, creating significant friction within the supply chain. Just like consumers want a seamless viewing experience across streaming and traditional viewing methods, buyers want to be able to buy, measure, and reconcile in a holistic, transparent, and consistent way across all television environments,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. “At Tech Lab, we have spent the last year analyzing converging use cases between legacy and connected television, getting educated on technical standards across environments, and understanding the trajectory of TV viewing and media investment. We’re confident this initiative will shepherd television buyers and sellers into the future.”
Objectives include:
* Create the structure for streamlined and normalized reconciliation of TV buys across CTV, linear, and broadcast environments
* Establish a common technical framework for audience interoperability, universal addressability, and cross-environment frequency capping
* Develop open-source, auditable measurability for tracking ad creative across all platforms
* Further develop Advanced TV anti-fraud measures and more accurately account for viewability
* Standardize the foundation for an impression-based TV market and universal ad break management using frame-accurate ad break signaling
* Establish a common technical framework for omnichannel programmatic buying via upfronts as well as spot buys

More than half (51%) of advertisers expect to invest more in Out of Home in 2023, according to a new survey of brand marketers and agencies released by BWG Strategy and Talon America. While advertisers are currently allocating 4 to 5% of overall ad budgets to OOH, the survey indicates 93% of advertisers are planning to allocate 5% or more of their overall marketing budgets to OOH in 2023; and 97% are planning to allocate 5% or more in 2025. Marketers report they are planning to shift budgets from other channels to OOH — with social media (31%) and linear TV (25%) representing the top channels that advertisers will shift budget from to allocate more investment in OOH.

Clinch announced the next evolution of its Sports API, offering advertisers more personalized options for connecting with sports fans. With the platform’s enhancements, brands can now reach and engage consumers based on additional attributes such as team and player affinities, game scores and outcomes, venues, countdowns to games, and more. “Sports fans are one of the most valuable audiences to brands right now and they consume media in more ways than ever,” said Oz Etzioni, CEO of Clinch. “It’s not enough to just have an omnichannel campaign strategy; you need to connect with fans on a deeper level to show that, as a brand, you truly understand how important a particular sport, team, or venue is to their identity, and how that translates to the products and services they’re most likely to buy.”

datafuelX has launched the data driven linear components of M3, a SaaS platform designed to support planning, forecasting, deal optimization, stewardship and posting, with solutions that address multiple currencies, platforms and goal optimizations. “Data-Driven Linear spend continues to rise” says Spencer Lambert, Director, datafuelX. “And at the end of the day, DDL still needs to innovate significantly. Publishers need better, more granular estimates to forecast and better analytics to optimize for yield while providing the value to advertiser partners. The current process simply leaves too much waste.”

Smart advertising exchange Yieldmo has struck an agreement to collaborate with IRIS.TV to offer omnichannel contextual curation to buyers across CTV, OLV, and display advertising from leading independent data companies. “This partnership is an important next step in demonstrating the way contextual and brand safety tools can overlap to enhance the media buying experience on CTV,” said Jeremy Steinberg, Chief Revenue Officer & GM, Exchange, Yieldmo. “For years, Yieldmo has been building its ability to use combinations of smart signals and behaviors to predict an outcome, and then optimize the campaign toward the inventory that meets those outcomes.”

Identity provider ID5 released its findings from a study with Sincera that found that within the sample of 63,604 domains it studied, the average number of cookies set on an ad-supported publisher that the publisher hasn’t directly approved or configured is 64.44. Meanwhile, publishers only knowingly deploy and configure 5.25 identifiers. “Publishers and advertisers need a better way to consensually share information across platforms and inform the identity-driven advertising that finances the free and open internet,” said Mathieu Roche, CEO & Co-founder of ID5. “With privacy-conscious solutions like universal identifiers, advertisers and publishers can leave behind invasive technologies like the cookie and adopt more efficient tools that drive digital media without doing a disservice to audiences, publishers, or the environment.”

Eyeo announced the acquisition of Blockthrough, a technology company that works with digital media businesses to recover revenue lost due to ad blocking. Its publisher-side ad-filtering technology detects and prevents disruptive ads from being served to users of ad-blocking and ad-filtering products. “Earlier in our history, eyeo was seen as a controversial digital media and marketing disruptor. Adblock Plus, the company’s key product, was initially denounced as an impediment to publishers and advertisers. Instead, it ended up serving as a ‘wake-up call’ – one that has led to an industry-wide recognition that the web must be a user-first environment in order for all stakeholders to thrive,” said Frank Einecke, CEO at eyeo. “Blockthrough’s technology is in lockstep with this line of thinking, giving consumers an online ad experience they’ve agreed to, while allowing publishers to recoup revenue otherwise lost.”

Ad Net Zero, formed two years ago in the UK by the Advertising Association, IPA and ISBA to respond to the climate crisis, has launched an updated training program and published a refreshed guide as it marks the first day of its Global Summit. The Ad Net Zero training is available in two forms, an updated version for UK advertising practitioners and a new international version.

Innovid has integrated its capabilities for UK and Germany-based clients with The Trade Desk. The agreement provides independent, automated incremental reach analysis through The Trade Desk platform. Selected users of The Trade Desk will now have access to a suite of cross-platform, incremental reach insights for advertisers running campaigns on CTV, surfacing the incrementality of streaming beyond linear TV, as well as unique reach by publisher, including publisher-by-publisher analysis.

STREAMING

Starting November 30, Peacock Premium Plus customers will have access to their local affiliate station through a channel on the Peacock homepage. The live stream channel will include NBC’s full lineup of local news, sports and weather, market-by-market, as well as “Today,” “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and NBC prime. “With Peacock’s local affiliate livestream, our subscribers are getting the unique combination of the ad-free on-demand content they love with the local news and NBC programming that is already part of their daily life,” said Kelly Campbell, President, Peacock and Direct-to-Consumer, NBCUniversal. “NBC affiliates have long been an integral part of local communities, and we look forward to being another point of connection and engagement for those communities across the country.”

Roku has officially launched a Sports experience that integrates live and upcoming sports across the Roku platform and introduces a centralized location for sports content. “We know that keeping track of where sports are being streamed has only become more fragmented over the past few years,” said Alex Hill, Director of Live & Sports, Roku. “Watching your favorite teams should be simple, so we’ve made it a priority to build out a more seamless and streamlined way to discover and watch sports on our platform. Sports are a vital part of the streaming experience, and we will continue to make enhancements to that experience, like adding more supported providers and finding new ways for our users to follow their favorite teams.”

Castify.ai, a content distribution and monetization platform, has announced a partnership with Extreme International, a content creator and media network based in the world of extreme and adventure sports. The partnership will allow Extreme International to rely on Castify.ai’s data-driven distribution abilities to monetize their content.

Frndly TV and fire pit maker Solo Stove are teaming for Cozy Holiday Bonfire Presented by Solo Stove, a pop-up channel that has joined the Frndly TV lineup. The channel will be available to all Frndly TV subscribers through January 3, and feature two themes: a fall theme followed by a holiday theme.

Cinedigm will integrate ROW8 into the company’s recently launched flagship streaming service, Cineverse. Through the partnership with ROW8, Cineverse will offer consumers the ability to rent recently released premium theatrical movies on a transactional video-on-demand basis.

SaaS platform Frequency has released Frequency Connect, a new feature providing a dashboard for linear channel operators to monitor and control stream health. With Connect, channel operators can detect bugs and outages in 24/7 content feeds, enabling them to mitigate stream outages in real time and make immediate changes to video formatting and ad insertion as needed.

Cynopsis Team